Imagine
by R Amythest
Summary: Sleeplessly, Soren considers exposing - or confessing - his secrets to Ike. Not his love, nor his heritage, but his mad little deviations. Warning for sexual abuse and cutting.


This was something I spontaneously wrote in one sitting. I wasn't planning to write this at all, because I figured I have a zillion things more worth writing, but I entertained the idea (more specifically, the idea of Trying To Do It Right) and it all popped out. So why not.

**Note:** The original version is posted on my LJ. The original version differs from this by a grand total of one sentence in the paragraph six from the end (you'll know the one) that happened to make this cross the line from M to MA.

The following are known flaws: Mild AU, because while not necessarily implausible, this strikes me as less than likely. For being written in first-second person, Soren's voice is not particularly accurate. And lastly, I'm aware that Soren has enough issues without heaping more angst onto him, but it's the nature of the prompt, and thus is unavoidable. Any other problems, I definitely want to know about. Flame me, if you feel like I deserve it.

* * *

_Imagine_

_

* * *

_Three hours past sundown, snow in Daein, new recruits and tents reassigned for space and for warmth. I always have the chance to have you here, placed in my tent where I can keep watch over you. Where I can have you all to myself. Reallocate some funds, to food, to weaponry. Say it's a more efficient use of them. It would be easy. You'd never tell the difference. You don't look that far. Usually I choose not to. Because the truth is, once you're collapsed in the bedroll, breaths audible even though you don't snore, smelling like iron and blood and the manure in the fields they drowned for us this morning, you are alive and very much like any other man in sleep (even though you are familiar) with your eyebrows thick where they slant over the bones above your eyes and your expression blank. I saw you before I blew out the candle. You could house any other person in your body and they would all be the same at this very moment. I don't believe in innocence in sleep.

I should, in theory, worm my hand out from the bedroll and send it across the chilly air between us to nudge the form of your arm until you wake. I imagine you – there are a few things to imagine here.

1) I imagine that you stir groggily for a moment, and at the sound of my voice saying, "I need to tell you something," you jolt awake with the irises of your eyes, blue, visible even though the tent is pitch black. You listen to every word I say until I finish, and I dissolve into your warm, solid arms (I imagine them to be warm and solid, anyway – I'm not sure if they are) and you tell me that none of the things that have happened before will happen again. You tell me that I can find a place, find a place with you, and you will keep me by your side forever. That you will want me by your side forever.

That is something I like to imagine. Not exactly. It's pleasing at the time I imagine it. Unfortunately, it has no connection to myself as I lie in a barely warm set of sheets that smell like stale water and rot, with my nose freezing and every breath I draw in dry and cold. That keeps me awake and firmly grounded. There are things that are real, and these are stronger in my mind. There are things that are almost-real. Those are almost just as strong.

That is why this one doesn't haunt me the most:

2) I imagine that you make a grumpy sound to say that you are listening, but I spill everything anyway, spilling everything like blood out of a wound. In your silence I imagine you imagine my pooling blood to be like an offering of excrement instead. But I can't stop once I start – my lips are uncontrollable when I imagine this to happen – and when I'm pale and bloodless at your feet (in the bedroll two feet from you) you get up suddenly. Although it's cold you don't seem to feel it as you tell me to leave. And when I'm still too weak and stunned to do so – and _I_ feel the cold anyway, coming in through the gaps in the blanket around my neck and somewhere lower around my knees – you say that if I won't, you will, you'll find Titania this instant and transfer all the duties to her because I have always been replaceable, and you can't believe I lied to you all this time.

There are many ways it could go from there. Sometimes I fear it. Often I imagine this of no will of my own, in my sleep. In the morning we exchange hellos and you sit down across from me at the table, expression seemingly grumpy to anyone who wouldn't know you better, but the small details of your face betray that you are content. The sight of you, and the tone of voice you take with me, have always taken with me, dispel that version of events to be just as unlikely as the first.

Then, the mundane, perhaps?

3) I imagine that you roll over at first when I nudge you. The top part of the bedroll gives way and the cold pricks at your back. Irate, sleep-deprived, muscles aching from the morning's battle. You wake up to the cold and mutter, and when I call your name tentatively you say brusquely, "Yeah, what is it?" and I say it's nothing. I'm sorry. Go back to sleep.

It's not very difficult to imagine this one, because I think that is probably how it will happen. Maybe it's happened once. Maybe I'm only remembering one of my frequent rehearsals. It would either be this or the next. The next is so close to truth that it burns me even though it's not horrible – not rationally.

4) I imagine that you turn sleepily to my nudge, sound of shifting in my ears, and you make a sound like you hadn't been asleep at all. I tell you half of it, and I pause because I'm running out of breath and the tears I held back are streaming down into my nose and down my throat instead. (Even though it's pitch black and you couldn't see – it's the principle of the matter.) You say, "I'm sorry, Soren. I had no idea. I can't even imagine," and then lost for words. Maybe because we're not that close and it is outside our decorum for me to say these things. (You are not decorous, but certainly your closeness works like that of any other's.) Maybe because as you said, you can't imagine.

You can't even imagine, and from that point on everything is changed. You try hard to show to me that nothing has changed. But you know it now – you can't forget that – and perhaps you imagine in the night, too. Not this set of imaginings. For me, it would be a recollection and I could never deviate from the thousand details that are unchangeable truths. Not without knowing that I have changed them. I am too sane for that, apparently. That's a strange thing.

I'm reasonably sure that there is even more aberrant (abhorrent?) with me of late. If I looked hard enough – I suspect the library need not be as exclusive nor comprehensive as the archives at Mainal Cathedral – it will probably be written in a book. Spindly writing. With curls at the bottom of the stem of their F's, like my mentor had told me never to write them, a ruler to the back of my hand for every curl. Acid eating at the pages, and page 153 nearly falls out into my hand. Composed by a doctor of the mind centuries ago, a refined man with an embroidered cape and gold pocket-watch who walked the corridors of the madhouses and wrote what he thought was going on. Perhaps not trying too hard to discern truth as the mad knew it. I can't blame him myself. I had always thought the same: Madhouse. For mad people. Mad people with unseeing eyes. Mad people struck dumb and dumb in mind and unaware of anything anymore. (It's not true. The unawareness. Sometimes I wish it were. The rest? Perhaps.)

The doctor will have written something to the effect of, _On the Painless: There exists, among those of impaired mind, less mad than some others but nonetheless no longer in possession of Self, those who act as immune from injury and bring knife to one's own limbs without forethought._

Could they be that wrong? Like the teacher who thought he knew the mark of the spirits? Or would they be terribly right? Like the book I'd actually found.

At least, unlike the matter of my birth, it would be something I already know.

It's not that I don't feel the pain. Not exactly. A papercut burns at my index finger on my left hand. It itches and I find it annoying. At the bottom and to the right of my chest, I can still feel the soreness of newly mended bone (still far better with than without the staves). I do not enjoy this. Nor do I enjoy hiding them from sight, the purposeful ones. Only until I can't evade the wild swing of an axeman in time and Mist on her horse clops over to me, the tip of her staff glowing and sealing the remainders of a knife (wooden-hilted, thin and slender, for quills and letters) that traveled in jagged, meandering paths across my thighs. Perhaps it's a part of that insanity that I can never explain to myself why I've given myself another burden. Keep it from infecting. Find the cloth to spare to keep the blood from showing. Ignore it when we march through all the hours of the light. Ignore it when I'm running with a book of magic tucked under one arm, desperately trying to reach the lancer before he reaches you – wounded, grasping for your vulnerary with cold-bloodless-clumsy fingers – and resolving that I'd never do it again. So stupid.

Then for whatever reason, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes negligible, I'd be there again, sitting atop a black rag meant for the women at red moon, tracing with the tip of that slender blade like a lover's touch, sharp and burning, until I realized how I'd inconvenienced myself again.

The doctors would have ideas about this. They might call it punishment, self-flagellation with a blade rather than a whip, for the few times I'd felt painful lust when you had your bathing day and showed your well-formed swordsman's body to the sun, and brought cool water to drip over it. Or they may say that it is the fault of my low-born blood, that as an orphan I was meant to be destroyed eventually, and that I knew this and in the absence of other causes, I would carry out this fate myself. Maybe, they would talk about my ninth winter. I wonder if that counts as the same sin as the first criterion.

It was winter, I would defend against the goddess if the priests are right and she frowns upon us all as we depart into the hereafter. It was winter. I had no gold. They were not employing mercenaries. There was no boy to save me a second time. I had nothing else to trade for food or shelter. Not even a book of magic. (Here she drags me a little closer to the damned.) I didn't even want to do it. I didn't even know what he wanted to do. He promised me all of thirty gold. Thirty gold that would save my life. (Who could worship this goddess? She'd never know the value of thirty gold when you have nothing but yourself.) I didn't have anything else. I didn't even know that what I had was valuable. I didn't even know I had it. Not until I'd sold it for five days' shelter, a week's bread, and a used cloak. (I imagine her face is smooth, almost eyebrow-less, like the features of a plump priestess. I imagine she laughs at me and says, "Oh, but you know now. Wouldn't you still do the same?") For more, perhaps. ("It is the same sin, regardless.") Yes. I would have died otherwise. Maybe, if I know what I know now – not because of what I know of sin, no, different knowledge altogether – I wouldn't have. Maybe I'd have rather frozen in a wayward Crimean street. Maybe. No, I don't think I could have. I still remember how ice covered the tips of my fingers. How they bit into my knuckles. How I checked every now and then in fear that they would fall off.

But that's not what you can't imagine. (Maybe you can't imagine that either. You could, perhaps, if you cared to.) No, this is what you can't imagine:

A man, tall and thin, with flavors of smoke that I'd never smelled before and never smelled since stuck to his skin, with a face I can't recall except that he was clean-shaven and he had a belt, not braided, one piece, securing a pair of coarse wool pants. He gave very simple instructions, instructions a child could understand, because that was exactly what he wanted, a child pleasuring him. A child's lips pressed closed by one hand, a child's jaw tilted up into the air, a child's throat without the lump of manhood moving in the process of swallowing. Then he had enough of simply giving instructions to be followed. The thirty gold should have been the child's by now, rightfully. Thirty gold and so much more. The belt around a thin pair of wrists (bones grating against each other but at least they had not fallen off from cold?) and around one bedpost, pulled tight, strapped in like a – not strapped in snugly like leather armor across a fighter's chest, nothing as belonging and form-fitting as that.

I'd like to stop. If that's all right.

I don't know who I'm asking for permission. (Not you. You'll never hear me say this.) Just that I should. It's nothing you can imagine by yourself. Even though I won't be telling you this. Night after night sometimes I imagine, and I recall, a story told a thousand times to myself. A story I don't want to hear anymore from myself.

Your breathing has been steady for an hour. You are asleep. You will not rouse like you have been awake. But you still can't imagine. Not this night, not the next, not the one after that.

Sometime tonight as my mind runs away with me I'll manage to fall asleep, and soon after it will just be another day called tomorrow. I'll have a briefing to write and correspondence to keep while my wounds itch and I pay them little mind. You'll come in for your report, groggy and with a mind full of your father's murder (and you won't confide in me about that either), and we'll exchange smiles anyway.

Imagine that. Imagine that.


End file.
